For years, I used Stomp for resizing videos under OS X. However, in addition to recently being retired, it has had trouble processing a number of formats of late, either hanging altogether or displaying lengthy time estimates (e.g., ~6 hours to scale a 6 minute video by half).

This post is for the scattered few who still sync calendars between their Mac and iOS device via USB, and find deleted calendars appearing in iTunes, despite those calendars not appearing in iCal / Calendar. Backup before proceeding. The iOS calendar(s) will be overwritten.

Disregarding the absence of desired calendars or presence of undesired calendars within iTunes, select Sync Calendars > All calendars, check "Replace information on this iPhone" next to Calendars, sync, then quit iTunes.

Open iCal/Calendar on the Mac and delete any unwanted calendars that appeared after syncing (yes, despite having selected to overwrite the iOS device, old, deleted calendars may reappear).

Even if you've never used it, open Reminders.app on the Mac and delete any old, unwanted calendars.

Open iTunes and head back to Info > Sync Calendars - only current calendars should appear.

Delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.plist and ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.helper.plist then sync. If unsuccessful, try:

/System/Library/Frameworks/SyncServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources/resetsync.pl full

いつの間にか iCal と iPhone5 が同期できなくなってた。 describes a scenario in which events from an iPhone do not get written to iCal on a Mac during syncing, though events from iCal, music, photos, etc on the Mac do get written to the iPhone. The author resolved the issue by:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/SyncServices/

rm -r Local.*

cd Local

mv conflicts _conflicts_

Keep in mind Apple's official guidance: "As if it were a swarm of bees, you should stay away from the SyncServices folder. Removing or modifying anything in the SyncServices folder--or in any subfolders within it--may cause unexpected issues. (This folder is located in your Application Support folder, in your Library folder, in your Home folder)." However, renaming or deleting the SyncServices folder has reportedly worked for some:

After 14 years of calendar events (>17,000, but still well within the recommended limit of 50,000), Calendar.app finally started acting up; a month-long period refused to sync via iTunes from an iPhone to a Mac, despite desultory remedial efforts1.

Time to archive and cleanup:

Backup calendar(s) to both ICS and ICBU formats; print to PDF for good measure

Copying LibreOffice.app's 771.4MB (13,307 files) from LibreOffice_6.0.2_MacOS_x86-64.dmg (235.9MB) into /Applications took over three minutes* on a MacBook Pro with a SSD and 16GB of RAM via Finder (rsync and cp were similarly sluggish).

By way of comparison, Android Studio.app's 846.9MB (10,720 files) copied from android-studio-ide-162.3871768-mac.dmg (445.8MB) via Finder in just fifteen seconds.

However, after zipping LibreOffice.app via OS X's built-in Compress command, it could be unzipped in less than twenty seconds via the default handler (Archive Utility). Why is copying from the dmg file so much slower? Perhaps The Document Foundation could offer a zip file rather than (or in addition to) the sluggardly dmg.

* (On first launch, there was another thirty second delay while "Verifying 'LibreOffice.app'..."; clear the quarantine attribute beforehand to avoid: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/LibreOffice.app)

Taking screenshots in macOS Recovery Mode or within a bootable installer #

Boot into Recovery Mode (Cmd+R) or via a USB bootable install disk

Utilities > Terminal

If you have access to the existing macOS install, you can use the copy of screencapture located at /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/usr/sbin/screencapture for the following. Otherwise, copy /usr/sbin/screencapture from another macOS install to a USB flash drive (e.g., SANDISK) and run from there.